The day started pretty late. My sister and I came home very early yesterday morning from a long night of fun. A bunch of stories make up that unforgettable Friday evening, which I will have to tell later, along with a million more I promised to write about over the last seven months in and around Hong Kong. I do have some trouble keeping this promise.
But today… I just can’t believe it happened.
My sister had always wanted to watch the Cirque Du Soleil. And since she’s here for the Easter Holidays, I thought we could catch “Zaia” at The Venetian in Macao. I booked our tickets soon after we woke up, very last minute. We were quite slow, considering the show starts at 5:00 pm and it was already noon. Usually, we’d make a full day out of a trip to Macao. But we relaxed, we were in no rush anyway. We luckily caught the cheap bus that would take us to the Star Ferry, but unluckily, my sister forgot her passport. That’s one bus ride back to the ‘hood and eight flights of stairs up to get it. It wasn’t that bad. We decided we could stay overnight in Macao and took some stuff with us while we were getting her passport.
So we got on the ferry to Macao, slept until we arrived and the next step would just be getting through immigration. Simple enough. It was 3:00 pm. We had two hours, plenty of time to make it to the 5:00 pm show. My sister went ahead while I thought I could get in automatically with my Hong Kong ID, but I couldn’t. I went in to search for her so we could go through together. And that’s when things became severely complicated. There were massive queues–at least a thousand people coming from everywhere, from all walks of life and they were all stuck in queues of which the ends are just impossible to find, and the section where they lead to was just as difficult to determine. It was like people were lined up to ride roller coasters or waiting to see a huge show. Of course, it’s a holiday. Everyone is out and it seemed to me that everyone decided to come to Macao. I couldn’t find my sister. I was tempted to panic but I couldn’t. I tried to call out her name loud enough without causing alarm but she didn’t respond. As I desperately tried to find where the end of one of the queues was, I found her. And it turned out she was in the wrong one.
Back to the very end of the “Passport Holders” queue we went. It didn’t move much and we didn’t know if we were actually at the end, if we were even at the right queue or if people were cutting in somewhere ahead of us. Despite this people seemed to be calm and just waited their turn, no one was complaining, nobody got mad, or maybe I just didn’t understand what people were saying. I looked at the clock and it was nearly 4:00. I turned to my sister and said, “We need help.”
I first thought I would ask each and every person in the queue to let us move up and pass them. But that would take forever and I don’t think anyone who has been waiting for hours and hours would appreciate a request to cut in, no matter how urgent it may be. For some people, having a show to catch might not be important at all. I could even get a tough-luck or deal-with-it or it’s-not-my-fault-you’re-late kind of a response. But this is a big deal for us. This is for my sister. I knew I had to do something.
I rushed back to the automatic entry section while my sister waited in the line. I politely asked one of the immigration officers if he spoke English. Thank goodness he did. I told him that we bought tickets to a show at The Venetian and it starts at 5:00 pm. Given the current situation, we won’t make it to this show if we stayed in line. I asked if he could help us. He said, “Follow me.” We went through the crowd and I called out to my sister to follow me quickly as we passed her. There were just too many people, the queues looped and swirled and people kept coming in from different directions; there were people trying to get from one end to the next, so confusing. I follow the immigration officer, uncertain of what solution he may have in mind. I just trusted that whatever happens, we will make it. We just had to.
We arrived at the other end of the immigration area. I turned around and my sister was nowhere to be found. I was calling out to her but she wasn’t responding. I asked the officer to slow down for a moment. The few seconds before my sister emerged from the crowd felt like forever. We continued to follow the officer and we found ourselves near a small office with a short queue outside of it. The officer told us to wait. People then started to approach him; they seemed to also ask for some help or explanation as to what was happening. Random persons handed him passports and ID cards, and he politely returned these and directed them to queue up. He went into the office and then called out to us from a window. Before we knew it, I was handing over our Passports, IDs and travel documents and we were processed instantly. He looked over the other officers and then to us, “This is a special case. Next time you have to wait in the queue.”, he said sternly. I was lost in the situation. Completely dumbfounded that it was actually happening. All I could do was somehow softly say, “Thank you.” After a few seconds, our passports were stamped and we were cleared to go.
A thousand people waiting for hours in endless queues, and a few more over at a special visa section. I couldn’t believe we were able to pass of all of them.
By the time my sister and I had walked out of the immigration area, our thoughts were spinning around getting ourselves as fast as possible to The Venetian, we had less than forty five minutes to make it to the show, find a place to stay for the night, oh no, the cheap hostel is fully booked, getting some Macao Pattacas, and what in the world just happened to us right there, did we really skip that massive, possibly 5-hour queue?!
I will never be able to fully explain just how amazing this whole thing is, nor will I never know why it all turned out the way it did. I realized that really, anything is possible. Things will, more often than not, be more complicated than this situation, but if we need something, if we want something, all we have to do is ask. But more importantly, we have to DO something. I know now more than ever that whatever happens, I will always try to find a way and do whatever I can to make things happen. Whatever it takes.
Someone up there must have my back. This is too incredible.
I’m glad that I was able to help make one of my sister’s dreams come true. “Zaia” was amazing. That’s one thing checked off of her list. How often can you say that you made someone’s dream come true today? Hey, what do you know… that’s one thing checked off of mine.
